Cartoon of RT editor Margarita Simonyan from Friday’s Intelligence Community Assessment

The much-anticipated Intelligence Community report backing up its claims that the Russians hacked the US elections in November has just been released. Titled “Declassified Intelligence Community Assessment of Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections,” the report is long on speculation and short on any evidence for the claims it was supposed to prove. It even came with a warning label stating that though the conclusions are reached with “high confidence,” that “does not imply that the assessment is a fact or a certainty; such judgements may be wrong.” We who lived through the 2002 “high confidence” in Iraqi WMDs remember this possibility well.

According to the report, the Russians conducted “cyber operations” against both major US political parties, used the Romanian hacker known as Guccifer 2.0, who they claim is “likely” Russian, “maintained access” to local electoral boards but “were not involved” in vote tallying, and used Russian state-run media to influence voters to vote for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton.

The Intelligence Community Assessment does not offer any evidence of Russian hacking of the DNC and thus provides nothing new to back its claims. Rather than explain the means used by the Russians to “hack” the US elections, the Assessment instead devotes most of the report to speculating about possible Russian motives for so doing. Thus it appears more a diversionary maneuver to compensate for bringing a whole lot of nothing new to the table.

Perhaps most surprising about the report — and perhaps as a result of the paucity of evidence for the claims of “hacking — is that a full third of its length is dedicated to quite unsophisticated criticism of the Russian television station RT.

http://www.dcclothesline.com/2017/01/08/is-that-all-there-is-intel-community-releases-its-russia-hacking-report/